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The choice is between exchange rates, discretion over monetary policy and free financial capital flows. You only get two out of the three, sorry that’s life.
The lecturer said so you can’t have control over all these three things, in an ideal world you would but you can’t have everything.
It’s like people want to have their cake and to eat it too.
You know what I want? That expression, the cake one, removed from my language.
It’s dumb.
Until I was about 8 I thought the expression “He wants to have his cake and eat it too” meant “it’s all the same no matter what you choose.” So when people said “he wants to have his cake and eat it too”, it sounded like to me, “he wants to eat his cake and eat it too”.
I thought this because to me, to have cake means to eat cake. When someone screams wildly “Let’s all have some cake!!” in my crazy mind, I think this to mean “let’s all EAT some cake”, not “let’s all be the owners of some cake and decide when we shall consume it at our own discretion”.
Until the age of 8 or so I thought that “He wants to have his cake and eat it too” was actually the idea behind the expression “six of one and half a dozen of the other”. It was at about this age that I realised that it actually meant “He wants to have it both ways” and I had no idea why.
After I accepted that the widely held understanding of the expression was not my interpretation, I went on for ages having no idea why “He wants to have his cake and to eat it too” meant that a person wants both outcomes from an action.
So when I was about 18, no joke, I finally realised what it means. It means he wants to KEEP his cake and eat it too.
OK so my brother and I both had the same issue with this expression and we aren’t dumb people so I am sure that it’s not just me that got lost with this. It’s an ambiguous expression at the very least and you know what, I think it’s stupid too.
Who the hell wants cake for the sake of having (i.e. owning) it?
In French the expression is: “He wants butter and the money from the butter”. That makes so much more sense!!!
You see this guy has a dilemma: “Should I spend my money on butter or should I save the money for something else I’d like.”
The fucking English idiot is like “Ooohhh I want to eat some cake but I also want to have cake for later.”
I regularly have to decide if something is worth the money or not. “Should I buy winter boots? I might not need them for very long and it will cost me money. I’ll have to decide what I value more.”
I have never once in my life been holding a piece of cake and thought “oooohhh I really want to eat this cake right now but my desire to have it outweighs that hunger. As such I will keep my cake for later.”
Option 1:
Option 2:
“I just can’t decide!! God help me!”
That is not a real dilemma. I mean, cake is not even a durable good. Whether you eat cake that day or the next day, it doesn’t matter because you have to eat the cake pretty soon. Money well invested could last forever. Butter could be used to make a cake. So the Frenchman is picking between money well invested and butter (or potentially a cake). The Englishman is picking between cake or cake. For fuck’s sake, cut the slice in half! Have some cake now and some cake later.
If someone says to you “here, have some pie.” I assume that you would think that he is offering you the slice of pie, to eat. If he came back ten minutes later and said “Dude, you ate the pie???!! That was my pie to have, my eating pie is in the kitchen”. You’d be like “Why the hell am I friends with you?”
What if the ‘having’ pie was full of poison? I mean it’s not for eating afterall, maybe they put chemicals in it to make it last longer. Would you say “Fair enough, he did say ‘have this pie’ I mean, he might have wanted me to keep it forever and never eat it. I accept my fate as I have erred must pay the ultimate price”
No, you’d be like:
“What the fuck dude, you gave me a piece of poisoned pie and told me to ‘have it’. You should feel responsible for my imminent death.”
I am not saying that the expression “He wants to have his cake and eat it too” makes no sense at all. I am just saying that it is confusing and it would be a lot less ambiguous if it was “He wants to keep his cake and eat it too”. It would be further improved if it was the expression that they use in French because as I noted earlier, the money-versus-something-else dilemma is a little more full on then cake-versus-cake-at-a-period-of time-in-the-near-future decision. If the English don’t want to copy the French because they still have beef about who’s cultural top dog of Europe then we can think of our own expression.
I would probably understand if cake got better with age... OK so if you said “He wants to keep his wine and drink it too”. Again this reflects the consumption versus investment issue that the money/butter expression contains. He wants to have his wine now but he also wants to have it get better with age.
He’s another suggestion: He’s a squirrel who wants to keep his nuts and eat them too. This works because we know that squirrels eat some nuts and squirrel some away for later. People do not squirrel away cake. So yes, that expression bothers me and now you know why. I am bothered but there is no need to panic, Shelley’s OK.
xx
Elle
P.S. I drew the picture on my computer so that’s why they’re a bit weird. Not too long and I’ll be home with my craft stuff and it’ll go back to normal.
P.P.S. I am perfectly well aware of the fact that some smart-arse is going to tell me “the origin of that expression comes from when Troy and his soldiers were given precious cakes by their wives and if they ate them too soon, legend has it that on the 8th day of the month..... blah blah blah.”
I don’t care where the expression came from. It is not clear. At the very minimum it should be “he wants to keep, that’s right... KEEP, his cake and eat it too”.
The 'cake and eat it too' dilemma could be a fantastic economics thesis. Call me a nerd, but all the different ways one values cake could be picked over.
ReplyDeleteBig fan of your taking-down-common-expressions post, next up I'd love to see you tackle "one in the hand is worth two in the bush." I argue that the one in the bush is worth nothing, because I have no idea how to catch one, let alone two birds in a bush. I wouldn't even know what to do with the one in my hand.
That's my rant, good stuff on the blog!
You could argue if you’d worked out how to catch the first bird then odds are you have acquired the skills get the other two. So there’s probably two equilibriums: one where no one has birds and another one where everyone has three birds all in the hand.
ReplyDeleteGetting back to logic behind the expression. Two birds in a bush is worth exactly nothing. One in the hand is probably worth more than nothing, albeit not much more than nothing. I would argue that there is little evidence that it is worth exactly two birds in bush. Particularly if we assume convex preferences.
As you point out, problematic to say the least.
And "a whole ‘nother kettle of fish" is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.
ReplyDeleteAlthough secretly I like that one... I think that it embraces its total lack of logic. Also violates widely accepted grammatical rules to boot.